Strikeforce is outsourcing it’s contender fights

Until a few days ago, Paul Daley was said to be fighting on the “Strikeforce: Columbus” card on March 5th, and it was presumed that a win there would earn him a shot at the winner of the Diaz vs Cyborg fight this Saturday (hint: it’ll be Diaz). Well it looks like Scott Coker couldn’t find an opponent for Daley or Daley’s being difficult as usual, because Fighters Only reports that he’ll instead headline a “BAMMA” event in England on February 26th against Deep champion Yuya Shirai (20-8).

As if postponing Paul’s Strikeforce return isn’t bad enough, Coker announced in a conference call on Monday that Daley’s title shot now depends on him winning the Shirai fight. That’s right, a Strikeforce title shot will be determined by a fight outside of Strikeforce. Not that Shirai isn’t necessarily as good as whoever Coker would have dug up, but still… since when do promoters use other promoters to build their title challengers for them? And why couldn’t this fight happen in Strikeforce anyway?

Coker says if Daley loses, “the deck’s gonna get reshuffled,” which begs the question: to what? What else are they gonna do, bring up Tyron Woodley from the Challengers shows and give him a shot? Pretend 2010 didn’t exist for Marius Zaromskis? It’d be better to let Daley sit on the shelf than to risk throwing away your #1 contender like this.

Daley’s Strikeforce debut wasn’t pospotend by Scott Coker, it actually happened two months ago when he knocked Scott Smith into a ‘living death’

Reverend Clint

daley blows midgets behind a dumpster

fightlinker

Adam – Damn, that was my addition. Already making the new writers look bad :-p

Reverend Clint

maybe he meant debut in 2011? or he is just an ignorant retard

UberShmact

Paul Daley likes to fight a lot and nobody that fights for SF knows when they will be called up to fight. I mean if a guy like Babalu has to wait a year to get a fight and only because he was a late replacement why not make sure you’re getting fights in other orgs.

agentsmith

Ryan, my inner Spelling Nazi wants to tell you that “its” shouldn’t have an apostrophe in this case. Sorry, I’m part German.

Mixed Martial Adam

No worries, kind of a dick move pointing that out (as the rest of the article is pretty decent) – but the word debut jumped out at me.

Overall I think the content from the new writers is a welcome addition to the site.

My major issue with Daley’s contender fight isn’t that it’s taking place outside strikeforce, it’s that Coker is talking about it like it has something to do with him. Daley should be next in line for a shot either way – there’s no one else credible for Diaz to fight. The fact that Coker is pretending like Daley’s fight in BAMMA is a strikeforce contender’s match not only makes him look like a jackass, it suddenly makes a meaningless fight outside of the organization into something else. Now if Daley loses, strikeforce is out a contender where if he had just said that Paul was fighting to stay active (or said nothing at all), we would be getting Daley vs Diaz regardless and the majority of fans wouldn’t know the difference.